José Saramago’s Childhood Memoir Inspires Companion Picture Books

Early in José Saramago’s 2006 memoir, “Small Memories,” he tells readers that he briefly considered calling it “The Book of Temptations” instead. His reasons were characteristically elliptical and charming: something about Bosch, and sainthood, and the fat prostitute who “in a weary, indifferent voice” invited a 12-year-old Saramago up to her room. (He doesn’t report his answer, but given how candid the book is elsewhere, it’s safe to assume he declined.) In the end, though, he decided that the title “Small Memories” better suited the book’s contents: “nothing of great note,” in Saramago’s estimation; simply “the small memories of when I was small.”

But for a great writer, of course, there are no small moments, and Saramago (1922-2010) was one of the best. Celebrated for spare, allegorical novels including “Blindness,” “All the Names” and “Death With Interruptions,” he won the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1998, and remains the only Portuguese author ever to have done so.

Saramago’s memoir, which appeared in English translation the year before he died, is a winsome look back at his coming-of-age in the small village of Azinhaga and later in Lisbon.

With its mix of peasant life, boyhood adventure and wide-eyed wonder, it makes perfect fodder for a couple of new picture books: “The Silence of Water,” illustrated by Yolanda Mosquera and translated (like “Small Memories”) by Margaret Jull Costa, and the forthcoming “An Unexpected Light,” illustrated by Armando Fonseca and again translated by Costa.

The texts of both are adapted from episodes in the memoir.

THE SILENCE OF WATER (Triangle Square/Seven Stories Press, 24 pp., $17.95, ages 5 and up) tells the story of a young boy fishing in a local river without success until a monster barbel takes the bait and snaps the line, leaving the boy with a “ridiculous, useless rod” and a stubborn desire for revenge: “I decided to run home, get another line, float and sinker for my rod and return to settle accounts once and for all.” The plan is futile — even the boy calls it “the most absurd idea of my entire life” — but it offers him a lesson in the virtues and limits of pluck and determination.

It also, happily, offers a canvas for Mosquera’s textured landscape illustrations, which portray the river and sky in undulating white and the other components (the boy, his dog, the teeming plant life and assorted villagers) in layered earth tones. There’s a suitably old-fashioned feeling to the art, which rewards close attention and includes parallel story lines and characters evocative of Saramago’s memoir: a girl in braids catching a frog, a young mother in a polka-dot dress holding her wading toddler’s hand.